The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance, by Chiara Bullen review: 'a certain amount of romantic tension'
This debut novel from Glasgow-based author Chiara Bullen follows a pointy-eared academic to the mountain home of a dragon. Review by David Robinson
Write about what you know, they say. For most fantasy writers, that’s pretty cloth-eared advice, few of them having day-to-day experience of battling with orcs or fooling dragons out of their treasure. But for Chiara Bullen, this slowburn debut does at least owe something to work experience.
Not, admittedly, much. For one thing, her protagonist, Ainsworth Gladsly, has pointed ears. For another, he has antlers. But at the prestigious Skarrow Library in Saltquart Kingdom, he is as much an up-and-coming academic as Bullen was at the universities of Glasgow, Stirling, Napier and Munster before becoming a full-time author. It shows, too: you won’t find too many fantasy novels in which the central character, as here, worries about updating the parameters for an academic research funding application.
At first, Ainsworth is sniffy about the project his course adviser has picked out for him - to write about the Misnich Inn at the foot of Mount Vengeance on Saltquart’s borders. Not only is it miles from civilization, but it will take him away from his sorcerer boyfriend Enach. On the plus side, perhaps he might find out more about his great-grandfather, who stayed at the inn before disappearing 50 years ago, possibly the victim of the dragon reputed to live at the mountain’s summit. Other adventurers probably attempted to get their hands on the dragon’s treasure, but the Skarrow Library doesn’t have any records of them. As this is the kind of historical research project that will put Ainsworth on the academic fast track, he puts his doubts aside and sets off.
When he gets to the inn, Ainsworth discovers that every single adventurer who ever stayed there left empty-handed, opting to return home rather than stick to their original plan of scaling Mount Vengeance and dealing with the dragon. No matter how often Honey the innkeeper (black hair, white horns, teal skin, golden eyes, tail) tells him it’s always like that, he convinces himself she is wrong. She’s not. This puts both him and the reader in a rather strange place, and one that is relatively rare in fantasy: limbo.
As Ainsworth isn’t using any of his talents as a historian to record heroic deeds, he sets about archiving the papers in the inn’s attic and protecting them from the damp. He also gets to know the staff, all of whom seem to have been somewhat bruised by the world beyond the inn. Slowly they replace their initial suspicion of him - justified: his intellectual arrogance and condescension takes time to wear off - with friendship.
Meanwhile, whole chapters slip by without a hint of heroism, a swung axe or a drop of blood. Ainsworth learns to appreciate the servants at the inn - the truculent shapeshifting guard, the cordon bleu chef who tires of competitive cuisine, the shy elf helper - and vice versa. There is a certain amount of romantic tension between Ainsworth and Honey, but nothing to frighten the horses or any other magical creature you have in mind, much less challenge a YA classification. By the time the denouement rolls around, it’s nothing one hasn’t long since guessed.
Much of this is deliberate, part of the trappings of a relatively new sub-genre called cosy fantasy, which has been gaining ground since the pandemic. In cosy fantasy, as far as I can see, the writer drops the reader into a vaguely agreeable world and er, that’s about it. In such a scenario, everyone is accepting of everyone else, no matter what species or sexuality, the hero finds friends and happiness and the reader is comforted by a few escapist magic moments. Otherwise, not much happens.
I’m all for positivity and cheeriness, and certainly Ainsworth Gladsly knows far more about himself at the end of the book than he does at the start. The inn itself is, for such a fantastic place, rather realistically drawn by Bullen - The Best Exotic Magical Hotel, perhaps. But although cosy fantasy may be on-trend, the absence of real, consequential, credible conflict makes it - for this reader at least - too fantastic a genre to bother with.
The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance, by Chiara Bullen, Del Rey, £20
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